Ao3 Turns 15 Today

Claim your title as “tumblr freeloader” (meaning you haven’t spent ANY kind of money on tumblr) here.

The best part about being asexual is knowing that you will never be honeypotted. I often picture myself as a mark in a James Bond movie who has information or something and Daniel Craig saunters up in his sexiest tux to seduce me and I’m just like “No thank you” no matter what he does and then he has an existential crisis and walks away in a daze then sends in Moneypenny cause maybe I just like women and I’m like “hey girl, no thanks” and send her away as well and they just never get the information. I am an immovable plot piece without even knowing it. Sorry James but I defy the tropes of your genre.

I'm so tired of winter. I'm always sick. Like they took my spleen (It was damaged) and now I'm sick all the time (I take almost no precautions).

Hi all! I made a form here about Wayne Family Adventures. I'd really appreciate if people who have read even a few episodes fill it out! I'm just trying to get a feel for how the fandom as a whole view it

Google Docs

Wayne Family Adventures

Please only fill out if you've read some episodes of WFA.

Thank you in advance!

The paranoia

Reblog or your mom will die in 928 seconds.

I love my mom.

I am risking nothing

I AM SORRY FOLLOWERS, I LOVE MY MOMMY

Will not risk.

sorry followers :(

i dropped by my favourite secondhand bookstore and found what is possibly the most incredible knitting book iver ever seen. that teaches you how to knit little gardens and sew them into a massive quilt 3d. the photos i took are atrocious and do NOT do this book justice

thats a PRIORY GARDEN WITH MONKS

IT EVEN TEACHES YOU HOW TO MAKE ALL THE TOOLS ABD BASKETS AND POTS AND PLANTS

LOOK AT THE SOME OF THE FOLIAGE

i have never been more upset to not have $30 ready to buy this. its incredible. i have to find it online somewhere. i knew the moment i saw this i had to share it with EVERYONE

With the ides of march fast approaching we must be prepared

Please reblog to make sure is equipped!

Hey I was re-reading ECM and I noticed how awesome your the writing style was and wanted to know if you'd be willing to share how you write like that?

(I've got exams and have to really work on my english lmao)

Thank-you very much! I'm glad you've enjoyed my writing so much!

(I want to preface any notes here by saying I started seriously writing when I was 12 and I am now... not that. So I have almost 20 years of writing under my belt)

I've actually done a post about writing that gives a few pointers so I won't re-hash those points, but will add a few extras about crafting 💖💖

I know I said I wouldn't re-hash things, but this point always bears merit in saying: the first thing you write is the worst thing you write. It's called a first draft for a reason and you shouldn't be precious about it. That means don't go stressing about getting your phrasing perfect. Rewriting your draft can do wonders (and that doesn't mean you have to completely change things on the rewrite!), especially if you're not a confident writer.

Vary the start of your sentences. It's a very easy habit to fall into (I still do it all the dang time); you write sentence after sentence starting the the subject ('It was...'; 'Peter did...'; 'She saw...' etc). It makes your writing feel repetitive. We fall into patterns in our writing and forcing yourself to think about how you can change up the way your sentences begin within a paragraph is an invaluable challenge. Consider your paragraphs too: when I'm on my first edit, I pay close attention to how they start to ensure they don't all begin the same way. That doesn't mean every sentence has to start differently, but keeping things mixed up adds variety.

Avoid info-dumping. Exposition (where you give relevant background information) is a useful feature but it slows the pace of your story significantly. What I see a lot of fanfic writers do is freeze time (quite often at the very start of the story) to give us 500+ words of information that could have been drip fed over the chapter (or several chapters). I'm absolutely not saying I'm innocent of this - I do it all the time, including the opening to ECM! - but something that I find can help is to a) make it interesting by setting up a mystery that the exposition doesn't answer, b) intersperse exposition with description to keep up the pace or c) try to make your exposition feel as authentic as possible to your narrator.

Be decisive: avoid phrases like 'seemed to' and 'felt like' etc. Instead of, "She seemed to glow with happiness' make it 'She glowed with happiness'. Simple changes like this just make you seem more sure of yourself as a writer because you're committing to the image. Again, this kind of indefinite phrasing is an easy habit to fall into but it's a very easy fix! Very often, the sentence will still make perfect sense if you simply delete these phrases (although sometimes it will need a few minor tweaks).

Metaphors, not similes. Honestly this is just a continuation of the previous rule! Rather than, 'It looked like an ocean of silver', 'An ocean of silver swelled before them' is much more interesting and committed to the bit! Again, that's not to say you can't use similes at all! They're great, but you should ask yourself if a metaphor would be better.

Don't be afraid to extend your metaphors. Extended metaphors are such fun. Consider my earlier example : 'An ocean of silver swelled before them'. If I was to extend this, I'd think about other images associated with the ocean. Waves, tides, sea creatures, the scent and sound of the water. And since I've compared it to silver, I'd also consider things that are semantically connected: gold, copper, jewels like emeralds, sapphires, pearls etc. Then I'd start crafting additional clauses/sentences to build upon that original metaphor.

Brush up on a wider range of writer methods. Honestly, teaching English helped me out a bunch here, but here are a few of my faves: polysyndeton: this is where you list with the same coordinating conjunctions (and, but, so, for etc) rather than commas. If you look at my writing you'd see I do this all the damn time. Anaphora: in the typical form I use it, it's where the start of successive clauses begin with the same opening word/phrase (think like MLK's 'I have a dream speech). Best used in a group of three in my experience. Again I use this all the time. The opposite of this (where successive clauses end in the same word/phrase) is called epistrophe. Oxymoron: a fun one. It's a paradoxical phrase (e.g. burning cold, loving hate etc) Hyperbole: an over-exaggeration (e.g. It's boiling hot. I walked a million miles to get here!). Very fun to use with an unreliable narrator or you want to get across just how unbearable/significant something is (but the key here is that it's got to be obvious you're over-exaggerating!) Synaesthesia: where you mix different senses together (e.g. The lights sang in harmony; the room smelled cold).

Planning does wonders for your story structure. For the longest time I was a 'pantster' and would just throw myself in writing on vibes only, but now I find that knowing where I want to take my story makes it much easier to place critical themes and the much loved foreshadowing.

I hope at least some of these can be helpful to you! These are methods that have helped me over the years, but the beauty of writing is of course that all of us over time develop our own 'voice'! Just because I say these are things I do doesn't mean that's what everyone has to do!

Good luck on your exams too!! 💖